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AAAS 2013: The science of politics

Until yes­terday, I hadn’t thought too much about the term “polit­ical sci­ence.” I prob­ably first heard it in high school or col­lege, when I accepted it as an item of poten­tial aca­d­emic study that I would not pursue and went on with my life (I con­sider pol­i­tics to be the single most abstract and frus­trating ele­ment of being a human). To me, polit­ical sci­ence wasn’t quite pol­i­tics (although I assumed it to be a poten­tial route toward a career in that field), and it wasn’t quite sci­ence. In fact, I never really stopped to think about why that word was even tagged onto the end of the term in the first place — until yesterday.

In a AAAS annual meeting ses­sion orga­nized by David Lazer, pro­fessor of polit­ical sci­ence and com­puter and infor­ma­tion sci­ence at North­eastern, five researchers blew my notion of polit­ical sci­ence out of the water. While the ses­sion was titled “The Sci­ence of Pol­i­tics,” which puts a dif­ferent kind of spin on things, I sus­pect the five speakers would all agree that polit­ical sci­ence needs to own the sci­ence space. And indeed, they argued that with new methods and tech­nolo­gies at its dis­posal, polit­ical sci­ence is finally becoming the sci­ence of pol­i­tics. Below are a couple exam­ples from three of the speakers.

Donald Green of Yale Uni­ver­sity kicked things off by demon­strating the dif­fer­ence between obser­va­tional studies — the tra­di­tional method used in polit­ical sci­ence — and exper­i­mental studies. The latter more closely resemble ran­dom­ized clin­ical trials of new drugs or ther­a­pies, but instead of testing out­comes of health inter­ven­tions, they look at polit­ical inter­ven­tions. They allow us, Green said, to get “an objec­tive sci­en­tific under­standing of polit­ical processes.”

Ques­tions like “what impact do direct mail­ings have on voter turnout?” (answer: very little) and “do our social con­nec­tions influ­ence our voting ten­den­cies?” (answer: yes) can be tested through care­fully designed field exper­i­ments cou­pled with pub­licly avail­able voting records. The obser­va­tional approach would gain infor­ma­tion about “exper­i­mental” con­di­tions by asking people spe­cific ques­tions after the fact (ie., did you receive any direct mail encour­aging you to vote?) while the field exper­i­ment would ran­domly sep­a­rate people into con­trolled groups. One group would receive direct mail, the other would not. So, instead of having to rely on inher­ently unre­li­able mem­o­ries, polit­ical sci­en­tists can do con­trolled exper­i­ments that yield much higher quality data.

Brown Uni­ver­sity pro­fessor Rose McDer­mott’s talk on the genetics of pol­i­tics had me a little ner­vous at the outset but bouncing with excite­ment by the end. It may not be all that pro­found to say some­thing like “con­ser­v­a­tives are more risk averse than lib­erals,” but to back that kind of state­ment up with phys­i­o­log­ical and genetic data is pretty amazing. McDer­mott star­tled us all by showing a ten-​​foot tall pic­ture of a taran­tula crawling toward someone’s eye­ball. Turns out con­ser­v­a­tives and lib­erals respond very dif­fer­ently to this kind of image (by the way, she was quick to point out that her studies do not look at dif­fer­ences between Amer­ican Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans, but rather indi­vid­uals’ con­cep­tual ori­en­ta­tions across a spec­trum of ideologies).

Con­ser­v­a­tives tend to focus their eyes on the taran­tula while lib­erals spend more time looking at the eye­ball, she said. Con­ser­v­a­tives’ heart rates increase faster and they sweat more when they’re faced with images like the one she showed us. Other researchers have recently shown that they can pre­dict with 85% accu­racy a person’s polit­ical lean­ings based solely on how their brains respond during a risk-​​taking task having nothing to do with pol­i­tics at all.

The var­ious ways we respond to fright­ening infor­ma­tion are her­i­table traits, McDer­mott said. And if con­ser­v­a­tives tend to become more fright­ened, it’s not very hard to under­stand why they might be more likely to sup­port things like mil­i­tary spending and the death penalty: those actions will help pro­tect us from “evil.” It’s not that con­ser­v­a­tives are more risk averse, as I said above, but rather that more risk averse people tend to be conservatives–an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion. Like­wise, there is no “con­ser­v­a­tive” gene or “lib­eral” gene as the media might like to pre­tend. “Its not that simple. It never will be that simple,” said McDer­mott. “These things are mul­ti­fac­to­rial.” Instead of a single gene, it’s a “con­stel­la­tion of path­ways” inter­acting with our envi­ron­mental expe­ri­ences, she explained.

Lazer’s talk focused on the ways net­works and big data can inform our ability to answer large scale ques­tions about the spread of polit­ical ide­ology through pop­u­la­tions. He specif­i­cally spoke about three studies exploring the impact of per­sua­sion, peer influ­ence, and col­lec­tive action. The per­sua­sion study was an example of the field exper­i­ments Green spoke of, with a ran­domly assigned group being privy to an online town hall event in which par­tic­i­pants could directly interact with their polit­ical rep­re­sen­ta­tive. The par­tic­i­pants in the meet­ings were more likely to vote for the member of con­gress than those who didn’t par­tic­i­pate. “We found sub­stan­tial changes in the direc­tions of the member’s opin­ions,” Lazer added, showing that the town hall meeting not only influ­enced the par­tic­i­pants’ feel­ings toward the can­di­date, but also the candidate’s feel­ings towards his con­stituents’ desires.

His peer influ­ence study looked at the changes in polit­ical view­points of freshman entering col­lege dor­mi­to­ries, in which they would reside for the next four years of col­lege. They asked the stu­dents to list how they were con­nected to all of the other people in the dorm and then looked at cor­re­la­tions between their var­ious polit­ical view­points. It turned out that esteem and close friend­ship influ­enced stu­dents’ voting prac­tices, but who they spent the most time with, spoke about pol­i­tics with, and even dis­liked, did not influ­ence their polit­ical leanings.

Finally, his project Money Bombs, a visu­al­iza­tion of how Bosto­nians gave to polit­i­cans during the 2012 elec­tion revealed the under­lying net­works that mobi­lize money, he said, showing how col­lec­tive action influ­ences polit­ical behaviors.

Susan Hyde of Yale, and Daniel Dier­meier of North­western also spoke about ways their work is bringing pol­i­tics into a more sci­en­tif­i­cally rig­orous frame. Dier­meier demon­strated ways in which polit­ical phe­nomena can be math­e­mat­i­cally mod­eled and Hyde spoke about her work using field exper­i­ments to explain the anomaly that fraud­u­lent democ­ra­cies invari­ably invite for­eign observers to mon­itor their elec­tions, despite the obvious cost they incur by doing so.

About the Writer

Angela Herring is the science writer for the Northeastern news team. In a past life, she made fullerenes (aka bucky balls) at a small chemical company outside of Boston while freelance writing for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, the Broad Institute and Novartis Biomedical Research Institutes. She earned her Bachelor's degree in chemistry and literature from Bennington College in 2005. In addition to writing stories for the News@Northeastern, she also maintains the university's research blog: iNSolution.

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